Reluctant Legend
by Crimson1
Summary: Finding himself in Central City, 1980, only blocks from his childhood home, Len can't resist paying a visit. Inspired by the new Legends of Tomorrow trailer.


That trailer. Len's FACE. Yeah, I couldn't resist. Sara insinuated herself as well, and damn I love her, and look forward to potential friendship between her and Len (and Mick). The ColdFlash is barely there, but it's me, so it's still present, but maybe not enough to tag.

Enjoy this Len introspection!

* * *

Len knew he wasn't supposed to go off from the plan. He had a job, a strict blueprint to follow—where to be, when to move. But they were in Central City, 1980. Len's not even yet ten-year-old self lived blocks from where they'd parked the spaceship.

He and Sara had patrol of the ship. Stay inside, cloaked, make sure no civilians got too close, and wait. They had hours until the others would be back. This was what made going straight boring, but Len's particular skill set wasn't needed tonight.

That would have been fine anywhere else, any other time, but not when he recognized this street from walking it for years, covering bruises and broken limbs. He could have worked on his cold gun. Could have made small talk with Canary. She was the most tolerable among their crew. But he couldn't sit still, couldn't stop following the path to his house in his mind, which he had conveniently forgotten to mention to Hunter and the others.

"I need some air," he said, donning a simpler outfit to blend in with any passersby. He left the gun. He wouldn't need it in this neighborhood.

"I'll come with you," Sara said, hair slightly teased, wearing an oversized sweater that hung from one shoulder. "We shouldn't wander alone." She rose to grab her own 80's style leather jacket.

"Not gonna get lost in my own city." Len stiffened, jamming his hands into his pockets.

"Do I really need to rehash Rip's butterfly effect speech?" She smiled faintly at him.

"Just getting air," Len turned away from her. "Company not required. I'm a big boy. I can follow the rules."

"Sure, but..."

Len didn't stay to hear her rebuttal. He checked the perimeter cameras by the hatch, made sure no one was in view to see a man materialize out of nothing, then stepped from the ship.

He really only meant to get air. Walk a couple blocks. He didn't realize his feet defaulted to sense memory and carried him right to his own childhood door until he stood there.

The neighborhood was quiet. Simple, lower middle class suburban. Far more normal than most people would have expected of Captain Cold's younger years. But this was before his father had been caught as a dirty cop and turned to crime full time. Occasionally, there were even good days.

His own mother had passed away by now. Lisa had been born months prior. Len remembered the weather the day his father brought her home. It had been beautiful, sunny but windy and wild, just like her. Her mother would leave in a couple years, and it would all devolve further after that.

Breaking in wasn't even a chore. Len's father had neglected to lock the door. It meant he was drunk tonight, something that happen more and more often. Len found him right away, passed out on the sofa. 30 years younger than Len had last seen him, at least 50 pounds trimmer, and just as cruel.

The hatred Len felt for the man surged in him like it always did, and just like always—save for the moment he fired an ice shard into his father's chest—he kept his cool on the outside.

He turned his back on his father, striding passed the mantelpiece into the dining room. His fingers reached out and brushed familiar surfaces, traced the outlines of faces in frames, especially Lisa's newborn photo. Had she ever been so small?

There were photos of her mother with Lewis, with all of them, some of Len by himself, but none of Len's mother. Not anymore. He remembered where the pictures had been stashed. Right most drawer of the hutch in the corner. He pulled the drawer open and there she was. Her smooth, flawless dark skin. The strained smile. But wait, there, beneath the rest lay a picture he remembered where the smile was genuine, holding five-year-old him around the waist and beaming at the camera.

She was beautiful, but his father didn't want his pretty new wife to be reminded of the old one. Len was lucky he didn't look more like her. If he'd had her darker complexion his father wouldn't have been able to pretend he and Lisa had the same mother, would have been reminded more often, would have taught his lessons sooner and more frequently.

 _Lucky_. The thought sickened Len. He wished he had looked more like his mother, the one half of him that was worth a damn.

"Who are you?"

Len flinched, stomach clenching, roiling at the familiar, too familiar voice. He shut the drawer, turned around slowly.

All at once he remembered that night from the other's perspective. He remembered the man who had stood before him when he was a child, having snuck into his home after his father passed out on the couch, Lisa asleep in her crib. A man dressed exactly as he was now.

This had happened before. Len was destined to come into his home this night.

He remembered not being afraid. Remembered that the man felt familiar and safe to him. Up until he spoke. Then he'd been terrified, because there was nothing safe in the words that followed.

Now, looking down at his younger self, in the dark of the house, at this boy in navy pajamas covered in dinosaurs that Lisa's mother had picked out for him—not Lewis, never Lewis—Len remembered the things that were said to him from this stranger. The bullshit, the mantra he clung to and lived by and thought back on throughout his life.

He wanted to change the story. Change the memories. Tell himself to be strong but compassionate. To hold onto hope. To always look out for Lisa but to believe things could and would get better. To wait for a young man in a red suit. To listen to him. Protect him. _Let him believe in you, he's the only one who ever will._

But that wasn't what Len remembered hearing, and even though he wanted to say those things, having his younger self in his sights, those weren't the words that left him.

"Be hard. Be cold. Never let anyone in. Protect Lisa at all costs, but keep her away too. It's the only way you'll be safe. And she'll be safe. It'll be better. If you're alone. No one can hurt you. No one can touch you. Not if you're the coldest thing in the room. So cold you burn anyone who tries. Do you understand? Cold. Right…here."

He raised his hand and pressed curled fingers to the spot over his younger self's heart. His younger self, who looked back focused on him, already cold, already too blank and grown up for his age.

"Why are you crying?" he asked.

Len fought to keep his hand from shaking as he pulled it back. Only now did he feel the wetness on his cheeks. "Because that's what happens when you forget what I told you. When you let people in. When you let them hurt you. So be better. Better than me."

It was the one thing Len truly meant, but it wasn't the right words leading up to it.

Lewis stirred. Moaned. Caused younger Len's eyes to widen as he darted away, not wanting to be caught. He dashed back up the stairs where he had come from, back to bed, where he would tell himself it had all been a dream, the stranger in his home one bizarre, dark night.

Len turned back to the hutch. Opened the drawer. Pulled out the photo of him and his mother—his mother with a real smile. He remembered the photo had gone missing. Now he knew why. He stuffed it into his jacket, small frame and all, and left the house and the sounds of Lewis waking behind him.

He walked much more swiftly now, long strides, always looking behind him, expecting Lewis at his heels, which was foolish. His father was dead, and the man in the house too drunk to tail him. But he felt eyes on him. Felt weight bearing down on him.

His feet headed back toward the ship, but he couldn't go inside, couldn't face anyone, couldn't be in anyone else's presence, not yet. He turned to head down another block, away from the ship. The park was close. The park was open, empty at night, not constricting like everything else, even the air, closing in tight and dense around him.

He reached the swing set and clung to it. Gasping. He tried to sit, to claim a swing and let his legs give out, but he couldn't release his death grip on the pole.

Len didn't know how long he stood there, fighting to slow his breaths, to calm his pulse, to see clearly and not feel like he was about to burst apart at the seams. When he finally did, he wiped furiously at his face, but the tears wouldn't stop.

"Seems getting air didn't help much."

For the second time that night, Len was surprised, snuck up on, not aware enough of his surroundings to fight and remain the strong pillar of ice he pretended to be. Instead of turning as he had with his younger self, he kept angled away from Sara.

"M'fine. Go back to the ship."

"Do you think I don't recognize these symptoms? That I don't know what it feels like?"

Len snarled and slammed his hand against the pole. "Don't need a lec—"

"That boy was you, wasn't he? You knew exactly where we were all this time."

The fight drained from Len as quickly as it had arisen, and he fought for the control to stop his tears. They wouldn't stop falling, staining his cheeks, wet and marred with weakness. He clenched the pole tighter to keep from shaking.

"Snart," Sara said, her voice soft, patient. "Len…" And then a hand, tentative but strong, gripped his shoulder. He tried to shrug it off, felt his insides tighten at the contact.

"D-Don't…"

But she was stronger, remarkably stronger than him, and managed to pull him from the pole, turn him—he went so willingly, too willingly, when the last thing he wanted was for anyone to see his face like this as his younger self had seen it—and gathered him into her arms in a too tight grip like he was used to from Lisa. Lisa never did anything half-hearted or flimsy. Her hugs bruised. This felt the same.

He sank against Sara. It should feel suffocating, like touch always did when he wasn't the initiator, but somehow the anxiety eased from his shoulders. He sobbed and he hated it. Hated the tears, the pain, that Sara was here to witness it, that she was here to comfort when he shouldn't need it, should be better than this.

"No one's above needing help sometimes, Len. If not the others, if not Mick, you can tell me."

"We're n-not friends," he huffed against her teased hair, smelling of Aqua Net.

"Maybe not. But I might be the only one who's been to hell and back even worse than you."

Len snorted. She had been, apparently, dead and gone and brought back to life. League of Assassins, he'd heard. Thought dead more than once. Beaten. Betrayed. Reborn. None of the others could claim that. Len certainly couldn't. Though being reborn…it was a tempting thought.

His mind swirled with a thousand dissentions, a million reasons to pull away, push her away, but his heart rate was calming, his breathing evening out far better than it had before her arrival. Soon even his tears were drying. So he let them. Let the silence hover and her hold linger.

Finally, he said, "Need to go home. Now," and tore himself from her grasp, looking beyond her, not into her eyes, but at the neighborhood around them.

"Back down the street?"

"Not there. Real home."

"The others—"

"We have time. Hours yet. Need to get back to Central. Our Central."

"Okay. Let's go."

"Alone."

Sara centered her gaze on him until he met it. Her blue eyes bore into him as harsh as Lisa's could, but this woman had even more demons, more steel in her veins.

"I don't need you to come," Len said.

"You're not taking the ship alone. So I guess you'll just have to accept company. Plus I know how to drive better than you do," she smirked, and turned on her heels, heading back to the ship, expecting Len to follow. He had no choice but to obey.

He considered attacking her from behind. Shoving her against the invisible ship when they reached it to knock her out. But this wasn't Palmer. She'd expect it. She'd counter. The one time he'd tried to get one over on her, he'd ended up with his arm twisted behind his back.

"Better for you if you don't think it," she said, as they neared the ship.

"M'not."

"Oh, you're thinking it. You just know better now." She turned around and smiled again, sweetly, dangerously, yet carrying sympathy in her eyes too, and how? This woman was a labyrinth.

They ducked inside the ship. She took Hunter's usual spot while Len buckled himself into his. They didn't speak as they left their crew behind in 1980 and landed back in 2016. He directed her to a particular building, one of the tallest in Central. Not the tallest. No. This one was tall, but also had the right view. The view was important.

No one was around to see them exit an invisible spaceship. Len walked to the edge of the building, angled himself toward S.T.A.R. Labs in the distance, and waited.

There. A flash of yellow lightning. A streak. Zipping through the city. A short intake of breath and Len felt fully calm now, the past—quite literally—left far behind him, as he focused on the present and the Scarlet Speedster at the center of it.

He didn't so much mind that Sara stood beside him. She didn't question. Didn't judge. Just stood and waited until he was ready.

"Okay. Let's get back."

She stopped him with a strong grip on his arm. "Do you want to see him?"

"No."

"You do though."

"I don't need—"

"You don't need anyone. Or anything. I know. Been there. Lied that. If it was true, there wouldn't be any tears left when you face your past. You can tell him, you know."

"Tell him what?" Finally, she let him tug his arm back. He stared her down. He might not be able to beat her strength, her focus, her skills in a hand to hand fight, but he could match that gaze and all the ghosts lingering in it.

"That he's the one person you do need, and would maybe…maybe let in." She smiled, with none of the danger this time. "Anyone could see it, if they knew what to look for. The way you listen to him. The way you've protected him. The way he believes in you despite everything."

Len heard his own thoughts echoed back to him, all the words he hadn't told his younger self. He couldn't respond, couldn't find his voice. He stared.

 _Let him believe in you, he's the only one who ever will._

"Maybe something else," she shrugged, never losing her smile. "Either way, you can tell him."

Len's tears had long since dried. His thoughts less muddled. Sara Lance wasn't his friend, but she knew him too well already. Maybe because some of him was a reflection she recognized.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, felt the small framed photo there that he had stolen from 1980. He'd risk any butterfly effect for that, but he wasn't worried. All of this had happened before. Only this time he was living it. He still had choices. Still had unknown days and decisions to make.

"Not tonight," he said, neither an admission nor denial.

Sara nodded. "Buy me a drink then? What's that place you're always talking about? Is it nice?"

"Total dive," Len chuckled. "Best place in the city."

"Sounds perfect. Strong drinks?"

"The strongest."

She checked her watch. "We have time."

Len gestured toward the ship. They parked in the alley behind Saints and Sinners, and Len introduced Sara to their best liquor—cheap but strong. She matched him drink for drink. When they finally left to meet up with the others in the past, the ship rose up over the city, and the trail of The Flash below them made Len feel better by the moment. He should have been bothered by that, but he wasn't, couldn't be. Not tonight.

Maybe this time he hadn't changed the past—for better or for worse—but what he was now…was that better? Jury was still out, he supposed. He hadn't told his younger self to hold on to hope, like he'd briefly wanted to. But that was the past. The Flash and the misfit band of heroes that had taken him and his best friend along for the ride to save the world, made him wonder if hope was completely out of the equation for the future still ahead of him.

* * *

THE END


End file.
